Giuliani unlikely to resolve Trump's Russia problems quickly

Rudy Giuliani (left) has been highlighting his personal ties to Robert Mueller (right), which date to their service together as high-ranking Reagan Justice Department officials. They were thrown together again by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, when Giuliani was mayor of the city and Mueller was freshly at the helm of the FBI. | Mike Segar/AFP/Getty Images

Rudy Giuliani has an explicit mission on Donald Trump’s legal team: Help the president lift the Russia-shaped “cloud” over his White House–and fast.

An early priority for Trump’s newest personal attorney will be to resolve the question of whether the president even needs to sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.

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Giuliani plans to meet in the coming days with Mueller and his team of prosecutors, and will also press them to swiftly conclude the portion of his investigation that deals with whether the president obstructed justice.

The former New York mayor is banking in part that his understanding of Mueller—whom he’s known for more than three decades, dating back to the Reagan Justice Department— can help clear logjams between the special counsel and Trump’s legal team.

“We’ve continued to maintain this cooperative attitude. Now, with the new legal team, we plan to move in an expeditious manner,” said Jay Sekulow, who serves as one of Trump’s personal attorneys.

But Trump’s legal team has talked of hurrying Mueller along before, with optimism that proved misplaced. And legal experts are skeptical that the addition of Giuliani and a pair of Florida-based lawyers are likely to resolve Trump’s headaches anytime soon.

“People have to understand that this is going to take some time,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC on Thursday. “We’re only about a year or so into this. From my view of this, I always thought this was about a two-year case.”

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While Mueller is likely to show Trump some deference when arranging a meeting time and place, he controls the timeline of the investigation—and almost certainly doesn’t share Trump’s sense of urgency, although some analysts believe he would like to avoid dramatic moves in the midst of the 2018 midterm election campaign that could be interpreted as political.

Mueller likely still has much work to do. At a minimum, he must see through his case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty to charges including bank and tax fraud and is set to face trial starting in July.

Talk of a speedy end to the Russia probe is “wishful thinking,” said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor from Miami. “It’s obvious the client wants it to be over and the people surrounding him want it to be over. But the only person who can determine when it’s going to conclude in the case of the Russia investigation is Mueller.”

One upcoming landmark is an early July legal deadline for Mueller to provide his supervisor—Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—with a status report on his work. Rosenstein then must determine whether the Russia investigation should continue.

Those practical requirements are clashing up against Trump, who has shown for more than a year that he wants the Russia investigation finished.

The president complained last March to then-FBI Director James Comey about the “cloud” hanging over his White House and how it was distracting everything from his foreign policy agenda to his legislative loss on health care.

His ire has only grown since he fired Comey, a move that prompted Mueller’s appointment and then later ensnared some of his former aides with criminal charges, while forcing dozens more to sit for interviews and spend thousands of dollars on lawyer fees.

Late Friday Trump tweeted: "James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council? Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?"

During a press conference earlier this week with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump described Mueller’s work as “a very bad thing for our country.”

“We are hopefully coming to the end,” Trump said.

Enter Giuliani, who has his own longstanding relationship with Trump and who told CNN Thursday that the Russia probe “needs a little push.”

“I don’t know yet what’s outstanding. But I don’t think it’s going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution. They’re almost there,” Giuliani also told the New York Post. “I’m going to ask Mueller, ‘What do you need to wrap it up?’”

Pundits mocked Giuliani for what seemed a totally implausible timeline. But Trump’s associates said Friday that Giuliani was referring not to the entire investigation, just on concluding talks with Mueller about a possible interview with Trump.

Giuliani has also been highlighting his personal ties to Mueller, which date to their service together as high-ranking Reagan Justice Department officials. They were thrown together again by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, when Giuliani was mayor of the city and Mueller was freshly at the helm of the FBI.

The negotiations between Trump’s lawyers and Mueller to hash out the details for a potential interview had been on track earlier this month but got shelved after the FBI last Monday raided the office and hotel rooms of Michael Cohen and seized materials as part of what the Justice Department later disclosed was a months-long investigation into the president’s longtime personal attorney.

With Giuliani on board, Trump wants to resolve the interview question quickly so that Mueller move towards a final determination on the president’s legal exposure.

That’s a risky move. A Trump interview can expose the president to questions under oath about everything from potential obstruction of justice to his knowledge of Kremlin support for his 2016 White House campaign.

Legal experts have their doubts that Giuliani will be the magic ingredient to get even Trump’s portion of the Russia probe finished.

“The idea that Giuliani has a special relationship with Mueller that will convince Mueller to end the investigation early is silly,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago.

“Asking a prosecutor to end an investigation early is an extraordinary request that is a Hail Mary at best,” he added. “If Giuliani achieves any success, it’s because Trump gives him leverage by misusing his power as president.”

There are also other outstanding factors at play, from the prospect that materials seized during the Cohen FBI raid might have legal implications for the president to the prospect that Manafort might be flipped into a government witness as his July criminal trial approaches.

“Any suggestion it should be resolved before the Manafort case is cleared is a ridiculous suggestion. Who knows what Manafort is going to do?” said Ray Jahn, a former U.S. assistant attorney in San Antonio who worked on Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton.

Mueller’s current pace, Jahn added, has hardly been slow. “To have gotten this far this fast is phenomenal,” he said, noting the one-year anniversary is approaching in May for the special counsel’s appointment.

In his MSNBC interview, Holder also said the special counsel was “moving almost at light speed what they have done in that first year.”

“But this is, you’re building from the bottom up. You build the case that you can and try to flip people until you work your way up to the top. It’s a classic public corruption case,” Holder added.

Trump allies remain impatient with such talk.

“The important thing here is getting any distraction being put in front of the president taken care of,” said Jason Miller, the former Trump campaign communications director who also served in a similar role during Giuliani’s 2008 White House run. “That’s very clearly what the mayor’s goal is.”

One question is how Mueller will fulfill the requirement of an internal Justice Department regulation that says special counsels must submit a report 90 days before the beginning of the next fiscal year about “the status of the investigation, and provide a budget request for the following year.”

“The Attorney General shall determine whether the investigation should continue and, if so, establish the budget for the next year,” the regulation also says. In the case of the Mueller probe, Rosenstein is serving as the acting attorney general because of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation.

But it is unclear how detailed Mueller’s report needs to be and whether it might be made public.

Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and Duke University law school professor, said Mueller could use his report obligations to detail his decisions on whether to prosecutor or not prosecute key figures in the Russia probe—potentially including Trump himself.

“He seems to like to be consistently sending the message that he’s not dawdling,” he said. “One way to do that is to say, 'here’s a picture of it, and we’ve run everything to the ground.'"

But there are other complications, including the fate of the materials seized by the FBI during the Cohen raid–and that could extend Mueller’s investigation much longer than Trump and his lawyers would like.

“More facts and more legal proceedings can lead to more witnesses, which can potentially lead to more facts. And so on,” Buell said. “In this sense, the case is expanding and not contracting.”